Alibaba's open-source models have accumulated three billion downloads in half a year.

The Qwen family from Alibaba has taken the top spot globally in terms of downloads of open AI models. Over the past six months, they have been downloaded more than 3 billion times, surpassing Google, Meta, and Chinese competitors.

For comparison: according to Hugging Face's report on the state of open models dated August 14, Google models were downloaded 418 million times in 2026, and Meta models — 227 million.

The Qwen lineup currently includes more than 460 open models. Developers can freely download them, fine-tune them, and build their own AI products on top — over 300,000 derivative models have already emerged this way.

Hugging Face calls Qwen one of the largest foundations of the open AI ecosystem. Alibaba distributes its models through its cloud platform as well, targeting enterprise clients in Southeast Asia and Africa, where competitors have significantly less reach.

Source: Bloomberg